Page 44 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

32 Communication, Commerce and Power

internationalized in that their mechanisms and policies become
adjusted to the rhythms of the world order. 35

Cox identifies a process he calls the 'internationalizing of the state'
in which the tension between national and global influences shaping
state structures, in the late twentieth century, is being weighted toward
the latter. This involves states being reshaped in response to changes
and pressures from external agents and forces and related realign-
ments of domestic groups and forces. Specifically, Cox argues that the
internationalizing of the state involves adjustments to 'the internal
structures of states' ... so that each can best transform the global
consensus into national policy and practice.' 36 In other words, the
internationalizing state entails not only an adjustment of what intra-
state agencies do and their relative power capacities, it also involves a
realignment of the historic bloc - the complex relationship among
dominant social and economic groups.
Rather than simply characterizing the American state as a domin-
ant agent modifying the global political economy - a position gener-
ally endorsed by critical scholars of US foreign communication policy
- or as itself a direct respondent to changing international conditions,
Cox instead recognizes the state to be a complex mediator. The state
has both been a facilitator and (in some instances) a barrier to the
growth and evolution of late-twentieth-century capitalism. While the
US public sector very much reflects the needs and conflicts of private
sector interests, the American state also is a complex institution by
itself.
Reforms to the intra-state structures of direct concern to DBS
developments and foreign communication policy themselves have
been shaped by the ability of the American state to change. Indeed,
the particulars of the history presented in this book cannot be
explained without an understanding of intra-state structures, and
this requires an explicit recognition that the state is a complex medi-
ator of often conflicting vested interests. The structural and historical
conditions in which the state performs these mediations are shaped in
ways that are most often out of the direct control of any particular
agent or bloc of interests.
Conceptualizing the American state, or any state, to be influential
in this way requires an understanding of the historical underpinnings
of its structural biases. Because they are ongoing institutional con-
structions, necessarily incorporating past ways of organizing, under-
standing and doing, elements of state practices are, to some degree,